In a web page, input boxes are often provided for users to input words or textual information, email addresses, telephone numbers, or the hyperlink information of files, and so on. During the design of these input boxes, web developers often prescribe the data types acceptable for each input box, for example, numeric type, Chinese character type, Roman letter type, and so on. After the user has provided the data input into the input box and submitted the data input, e.g., by pressing “enter” or moving onto the next input box, the inputted data is verified against the data type(s) prescribed for the input box to determine whether the input data meets the requirements of the input box. Frequently, the requirement of the input box is provided in the form of a regular expression corresponding to the input box.